Illuminations

The Wedding Guest

by Anthony Esolen

I don't know that I've ever seen turkey vultures squabbling over a dead animal on the side of the road. Vultures seem to be cooperative sorts. Plenty of meat for everybody, boys. Not so perhaps with man.

Our fiercest social battles now have to do with marriage—what it is, who gets to enjoy it and how many, what it means, and whether children are accidental or accessory to it, like handbags. One would think that everyone was battering down the door of every house of an eligible young person of either or (in our time) indeterminate sex, so that a girl (or in our . . .

Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.